CCTV News:Faced with the question that "voice" is greater than "product", since the beginning of this year, the new car-making force, which is mainly based on the Internet, has begun to provide a large number of new cars to the market. In the first half of this year, the production and sales of the three head enterprises, Tucki, Weimar and Weilai, all approached 10,000 vehicles. While consumers are experiencing the new mode of building cars on the Internet, new problems have also emerged.
Just bought a new car, changed the old one, and the loyal car owner turned black.
Early in the morning, Zhu Yue drove his new car, which he had just bought for less than a month, from Shenzhen to Xpeng Motors headquarters. Now, he has long forgotten the joy when he picked up the car. The purpose of going to Guangzhou this time is to discuss this new car.
Zhu Yue, owner of Xpeng Motors, Shenzhen, Guangdong:I feel trapped and cheated. Because at the beginning, I also wanted a high battery life when I ordered this car, but the sales kept telling me that there was no such version.
To Zhu Yue’s surprise and anger, on July 10th, Xpeng Motors officially released the G3 2020 model and accepted the reservation at the same time. The new model not only fully optimizes the chassis and braking performance, but also greatly increases the maximum cruising range from 365 km to 520 km, while the price has only increased by more than 10,000 yuan.
Zhu Yue, owner of Xpeng Motors, Shenzhen, Guangdong:I can’t accept this high-endurance version later. I have repeatedly stressed the need for a high-endurance version even if the price is increased.
What makes car owners most dissatisfied is that in June, many salespeople not only denied that there would be a new car with high endurance in the near future, but also urged car owners to book cars on the grounds that subsidies for new energy vehicles would decline.
Hao Xianju, owner of Xpeng Motors, Guangzhou, Guangdong:There is no reason to build a car, only half a month and then build it. So I feel misled and cheated.
Fan Nina, Head of Guangzhou Gaode Land Experience Center in Xpeng Motors:We also know the news synchronously with the consumer, just one hour in advance.
Data show that G3, as the first product in Xpeng Motors, did not start mass delivery until March this year. In other words, most car owners have only used 2019 new cars for less than 4 months, and now they have become old models. In June 2019 alone, the 2019 model of G3 sold 2,237 vehicles, accounting for almost a quarter of the total cumulative sales of 9,596 vehicles.
Li Pengcheng, General Manager of Xpeng Motors Brand Public Relations:There are some differences between the new forces of making cars and traditional automobile enterprises. Our products will be iterated quickly from now to the future, and the hardware iteration, such as the electronic control of battery motors, has indeed developed rapidly in recent years, so the product iteration will be relatively faster.
The solution is not satisfactory. It is difficult for consumers to defend their rights.
In the face of the dissatisfaction of car owners, recently, He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xpeng Motors, publicly apologized on the Internet. "The rapid iteration of our hardware really blocked our former Pengyou, sorry!" This week, Xpeng Motors officially gave the exclusive rights and interests of the old car owners, but consumers didn’t buy it. Just this weekend, car owners in many cities across the country are defending their rights to Xiaopeng Automobile.
At the Xpeng Motors Service Center of Chengshou Temple in Beijing, more than 30 car owners and the staff of Xpeng Motors are having a heated debate. According to the solution put forward by Xpeng Motors on July 24th, every old car owner has two choices: to get a consumption fund of 10,000 yuan now, or to choose the right to replace it with a 60% discount when it is replaced in Xpeng Motors three years later. Faced with such a solution, the car owners at the scene did not agree.
The legal person believes that if the salesperson’s introduction to the old model is true and no other facts are fabricated, it will be difficult to legally determine that it constitutes fraud, and it will be difficult to terminate the contract. At the same time, it is not easy to organize evidence to prove that salespeople are subjectively and intentionally concealing facts.
Li Bin, lawyer of China Consumers Association Lawyers Group:If all the information propaganda of the old car itself is true, it just means that you bought the old car because you didn’t know that the new car was coming on the market, which obviously doesn’t conform to the legal situation that you can legally return the car unilaterally, so I’m afraid it won’t be realized.
Iteration accelerates to normal, and new forces encounter new problems.
The core of the dispute between consumers and Xpeng Motors is the iteration of automobile product upgrading. Under normal circumstances, the price of traditional cars will be gradually lowered over time. Car companies will generally forecast the new models in advance, and promote the price reduction of the previous generation models to a certain extent, and the update time is generally 3 ~ 4 years. This time, Xpeng Motors caused controversy mainly because the product iteration was too fast, and the news of updating the model was not told to consumers before. These new problems are also industry problems faced by Internet car companies.
The new car-making forces, represented by Weilai, Tucki and Weimar, have deep Internet genes, and their sales models are very different from those of traditional cars. On the one hand, the iterative speed of product upgrade is fast, and the technology will be updated in half a year or even three months. On the other hand, because the enterprise has a weak foundation for building cars, the production cycle of initial models is long, and consumers have to wait for several months or even more than one year after placing orders.
Experts said that at present, the domestic battery cost is basically declining at a rate of 20% per year, and the cruising range is rapidly increasing, with "revolutionary changes" almost every year. In order to seize the market, all car companies will apply the latest technology to new cars at the first time, and the price is also sold at the cost.
In December last year, the second mass production model ES6 of Weilai was officially launched, which caused a dispute about whether the old model ES8 would be eliminated or reduced in price. On February 28 this year, Tesla officially announced that the price of all the models on sale had been greatly reduced, which was fiercely resisted by the old car owners. Tesla was also forced to introduce a compensation plan for users who had placed an order and did not mention the car. How to deal with the relationship between technology upgrading, rapid product iteration and consumers will be an urgent problem for Internet car companies.
